A Big Thing

4.6.06

A Big Thing happened just today, about 20 minutes ago, in Darkan. I was sitting home with a sore throat (tamakum oroatat) drinking tea with Eje, Chong Ene, Gusara and Kutman. Chong Ene had made me put on my coat and scarf because I was sick so I looked very similar to a penguin. Then we all heard something coming from outside. It sounded familiar but I didn’t quite know what it was. Eje said, “vertaliot!” and then I knew! I ran outside so fast one of my shoes fell off and pointed my nose at the sky. Sure enough, it was a helicopter! I stared wide-eyed and excited at it until it disappeared from sight; off towards Karakol.

Now some of you, perhaps all of you may be thinking, “What is he on? Crack? or the Kyrgyz version thereof?” The answer to your question is “no.” Unless they, unbeknownst to me, pump something into the heating system in my house. In this case the answer would be a slightly different “yes.”
You may be thinking, “Why did you run outside, displacing a shoe in the process?” The answer to the first part of your question would be, “Because helicopters don’t very well fit inside.” This is unless you happen to have a large amount of cubic-feet of amassed air in your house like that of Monticello or Brittany Spears’ house. The answer to the second part of your question is that because of helicopters’ bouncy and their aversion to the ground they don’t change speeds very quickly, not a lot of delta-V in other words, so therefore I had to run outside, forgetting my shoe in the process, and look for this chimera circumambulator or else I would miss it and I definitely didn’t want that.
A statement this time. You may, at this time, be saying to yourself, “But its just a helicopter!” And I would say, “Very true!” It had all the regular helicopter-parts arranged in a helicopter-fashion as far as I could tell because it was in the sky and I was on the ground which are two completely different places. Very far away from it in other words. But on Issyk-Kul I have not seen a helicopter, or airplane, anything manufactured by the hands of a person, in nigh near a year. I’ve seen lots of birds, magpie and magpie-like and ravens, so I’m pretty used to them by now and don’t pay them much heed. But you never see something very mechanical with moving gears and sprockets in a sky like Issyk-Kul’s. I think if I ever have grandchildren this occurrence will be something that I relate to them.